May 14, 2007

Volvo have launched their new car the C30 on the back of the line "Love it or Hate it." I'm going to ignore the fact that I have heard that line somewhere before, and carry on with making my point.

My point is that the stereotypical view of Volvo is that they neither inspire love nor hatred; they are the very definition of bland. The great thing about the Marmite campaign was that everyone does either love it or hate it, you get very few sitters on the fence.

Marmite was then founded on a very simple but very perceptive piece of consumer insight.

I'm not sure that Volvo can claim the same for their new campaign though. A great consumer insight about Volvo would be that everyone thinks they are boring, middle of the road, uninspiring (etc).

Instead it seems like they have tried to manufacture a controversy out of nothing.

they are practically begging for people to have extreme opinions. Which I'm not sure they will - I can imagine most people will be left fairly ambivalent and maybe a little confused by their latest campaign.

The car brand that for me has shown the best consumer insight of (semi) recent times is Skoda - they directly steered towards the reputation that Skoda's had of being complete heaps of junk and made it integral to their campaign.

If you look at this commercial, and compare it to the frenetic mix of Volvo's new campaign, it's clear which one is based on the purer consumer insight (I actually struggled to find the images I remember from the campaign, but hopefully this one illustrates my point:

Anyway I'd prefer clear strategy that comes from a great consumer insight over frenetic, let's try and shoe horn some controversy to drive user engagement in order to tick the web 2.0 box any day.

I hate bitching about something that has had so much time and effort put into it, but I just think Volvo missed a trick by not 'doing a skoda' and addressing the topic that may be most painful for them (i.e. their cars are dull) but may have the most traction with consumers.

May 10, 2007

This is the age of content creation. This is the age of consumers generating their own content, consumers taking control away from companies, brands, broadcasters and the rest.....however:

A new study by Hitwise apparently suggests that the number of generators of user-generated content is even smaller:

"A tiny 0.16 percent of visits to Google's top video-sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload video for others to watch, according to a study of online surfing data by Bill Tancer, an analyst with Web audience measurement firm Hitwise. Similarly, only two-tenths of one percent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo Inc., are to upload new photos, the Hitwise study found."

What this shows is that although there are now more ways in which to express yourself and create your own content, only a very few number of people actually end up doing it. A chap I work with, Chris Stephenson who writes here points out that the major factors that prevent everyone from being a creator are talent and resources:

this cap on creation was historically down, I suppose, to two factors: firstly ability - not everyone is a Gaudí or Tolkien. but secondly it was determined by an individuals capacity to create and the resources available to them...creation comes at a cost (be it resources or time), and not everyone can afford

Now I agree with him that the second factor - cost - has been negated to a certain extent by the explosion of web 2.0 - literally everyone can create and dsitribute their own content. If you look at the penetration of mobile phones capable of taking video footage, arguably everyone has the capability to be a film maker - just think of the massacre at Virginia Tech where one of the most broadcast pieces of footage was from a mobile phone.

However, the factor that will not change is that not everyone can physically produce good content, because not everyone has the talent. It's probably an extreme case of the 80:20 rule where 80 percent of the best content is being produced by 20 (or in this case even lower) percent of people.

Now to put a final spin on it, a quote by Ivan at futurelab where this story came from is:

"the bigger force is not consumer-generated content, it's consumer-edited content."

So someone with the talent creates it, and someone with less talent takes it, tinkers with it, maybe improves it?

April 11, 2007

So Ask.com have been advertising heavily on TV, Radio and Outdoor for a month or so in an effort to make people aware that there is an alternative to Google when it comes to search.

They had to do something, as Google is already synonymous with 'search' for the majority of internet users.

What is interesting though is that they have chosen traditional media channels to try and influence people's online behaviour. This could illustrate a number of things:

a) Ask.com have failed spectacularly to reach people while they are online, because when people are online, they automatically go to Google - using Google for search is the equivalent for many of using a kettle to boil water

b) That people use search as their gateway to the internet, and Google guards the gateway - users first go to Google, then go wherever it is they want to go. This means that you have to reach people before they are online, otherwise Ask.com will never reach them with their message.

c) There is still real value in the traditional media channels when it comes to influencing people and changing behaviours.

d) Search is now a product just like any other - and consumers have a choice about who they use to provide this service.

November 02, 2006

Second life is a virtual online world where you can live out your life as a 3D avatar. I have written a post about it here so check that out, but also check out this post from the blog Lunch Over IP by Bruno Giussani - there isn't a better round up of what it is anywhere else. I realised I would never be able to do it justice so have copied and pasted the entire post. Let me know what you think about Second Life?

And why is it worth reading? Well, Second Life is the newest 'thing' to hit the marketing and advertising worlds and if you know what it is, that means you can talk about it and have an opinion. If you are interested in digital advertising, you're gonna look a bit behind the times if you don't know what it is...

Second Life: the next platform

There is a media frenzy over Second Life, the synthetic world (previousposts). Wired published in its October issue a "Travel Guide" to SL and announced the opening of their SL space where "all manner of festivities, lectues and events" will take place. The Economistpublished a major report earlier in the month. The Observer sent embedded a reporter for a weeklong trip and devoted two full pages to it. The Swiss Sunday paper Il Caffé publishes a weekly SL column. The BBCrecreates music festivals on a virtual island. CNetset up a 3D replica in SL of its office building in San Francisco and plans to have its reporters conduct interviews and host events there. Reutersopened a news bureau with a full-time correspondent, Adam Pasick, who moves in the virtual space as avatar Adam Reuters, featuring a press badge around his neck (image right). The Reuters SL page even charts the Linden-US$ exchange rate (the Linden is the virtual world's own currency). The list could go on.

Corporations are also there: American Apparel, Adidas, IBM, Wells Fargo, carmakers Nissan and Scion, and many others, have set up a presence in SL (mainly with the help of the same two "virtual world consultancies", Million Of Us and the Electric Sheep, who get paid real dollars to set up the virtual stuff). And the musicians: Duran Duran and rapper Talib Kweli and Suzanne Vega are among those who have played virtual gigs there. And the politicians: the former governor of Virginia, Marc Warner, who was until recently considered a potential presidential candidate (he said he wont' run), was the first to give an interview in SL. And dozens of schools: Harvard's Berkman Center offers live law classes in SL, for example. And of course blogs such as New World Notes, SecondLife Insider, Podcast.com and Business Communicators of SL "cover" Second Life with real depth (what I mean is: almost as they would cover real life).

Something, clearly, is happening there. "I'm struck by the insane seriousness of this place", writes the Observer reporter. If you're not clear where "there" is: SL is a synthetic world, a 3D online simulation where you "walk" (slower) or "teleport" (faster) around in the shape of an avatar - a computer representation of actual people, in lifelike form - and can interact (through messaging) with others, buy property and build buildings, shop, listen to music and much more. It's not a game. There are no warfighters nor "levels" to overcome. To get there, you go to secondlife.com and download a piece of software. You enter through Orientation Island, where you can get acquainted with the interface, then start roaming the world - or, if you feel you need more assistance, seek out a mentor. It's free as long as you only want to "walk" around; you have to pay to buy local currency (the Linden) or to buy land (so you can build, invite your friends over, set up a shop, or resell).

The synthetic world looks like this (the screenshot is from the Wired story, and shows only a very tiny part of SL):

And this is a very partial map of SL (the green dots are active avatars - people that are logged in; the pink stars are events; and teh green squares with a yellow dot are "telehubs"), it looks very much like a real-world map:

Yes, many people wonder "who has time for all this". But many others have the time, enjoy it, meet friends, create digital goods - clothes or jewelry for the avatars, built virtual real estate - that they then sell for real money (the Linden can be exchanged for real dollars; the Observer writes that more than 3000 residents already earn real money, and that "the richest avatar owns a property empire worth US$ 250'000 and employs 17 real-life people"; the current GDP of SL is estimated at about 600'000 US$ a day, but beware the taxman). How many are the "residents" of SL? Total population as I write stands at 1'203'213. That's however the total of all those who have signed up since the SL inception, three years ago. In reality at any given time there are just a few thousand people online (6460 right now, 499'223 that have logged in at least once in the last two months). According to Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale, the median age of the users (median meaning that half of them are above that) is 31, females account for 36% of them but for 44% of usage hours.

SL is basically a very malleable environment where residents can do (create) whatever they want. In many ways, it is increasingly shadowing the real world and starting to impact it (for a pretty amazing example, check out how the borough of Queens, NY, used SL to get advice on the redevelopment of Landing Lights Park; check out also the Democracy Island workshops; and read what doctor Peter Yellowlees, a schizophrenia expert, is doing there). And most of it is the product of the imagination and the work of its users. Because Linden Lab, the company behind it, only established some protocols and then stayed out of the way, letting the "locals" build. Robert Scoble, who looks at it from a techie perspective, says that Second Life is an operating system:

You can store files there. You can script things (there's a whole API). In fact, it's a platform. You can build a video game inside of second life. Or a music store. Or a dance studio. Or a city. Or a helicopter. Or a video screen that plays whatever content you want. Or fountain that spits blood. Or, pretty much anything you can dream up.

Including experimenting. Most of what's done now in SL is about experimenting - the BBC concerts and the CNet offices and the Scion virtual cars (and my own exploring). Not only because it still takes pretty powerful hardware to participate and the software is not perfect either: glitches and tech troubles are a fact of (second) life. I know companies that are asking themselves that very question: should we get involved? Send our people in there? Buy an island? (Current price: about 1500 US$, plus monthly maintenance fees - running the servers - of US$ 195.) The current media frenzy is interesting: SL has been a geek thing for a couple of years; now the media have discovered it, are hyping it, and businesses want a presence (it feels like when they "had" to have a website ten years ago) and as a result the number of residents is skyrocketing, and the number of SL-related press releases is growing even faster (and a PR consultancy, needless to say, has opened a SL branch, too). That doesn't detract from the potential for Second Life (or similar synthetic worlds) to become a new kind of interface to information and for interactions, to be the next platform (to use Robert's word), to develop into a 360-degrees 3D experience.

October 15, 2006

Web 2.0 is all the websites out there that get their value from the actions of users

Before doing my stint in digital at Agency Republic I thought Web 2.0 was a whole new type of software or a new version of the net, but it's not - it's just a term used to categorise sites and services that derive their value from their users.

Check out Fan Pop - it is a site where content is collated into 'spots' about certain topics. The Web 2.0 Spot is as good a place to start as any, if you are interested in learning a bit more.